A report has identified the 12 most notable new technologies expected to make a major impact on Australian tertiary education in the next five years, with four of them making a significant mark in the next 12 months.

The report, Technology Outlook Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018, used an advisory board of 45 experts to sift through articles, news, blog posts, research and project examples to select the technologies likely to have most impact on universities and colleges.

The 12 selected were catagorised into “time-to-adoption horizons" of one year or less, two to three years and four to five years.

Learning analytics – “big data" applied to education. Students work online and their progress is monitored to allow teachers to quickly identify who is struggling and what learning techniques work best.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) – free high-level courses on the internet that “scale up" tertiary courses to tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Mobile learning – using smartphones and tablets with apps, cameras, microphones and other tools to allow learning and research to take place anywhere.

Social media – allows educational institutions to have conversations with students, prospective students and educators, and to create powerful learning networks.

3D printing – create accurate models to ­visualise and handle objects that are not readily accessible such as animal anatomies, fossils, artefacts or toxic materials.

A round-table including Larry Johnson, the chief executive of New Media Consortium, met on March 28 to discuss the findings and develop recommendations to help the higher education sector prepare for and ­harness the emerging technologies identified in the report. The participants were:

Deborah Jones: What is really exciting is that it’s starting to inform us [at the University of Melbourne] of how we go about thinking about consistent online delivery elsewhere in the university. To get that right is a key issue for us. We selected courses which reflected the strengths of the university and academics who would be able to carry that well and with enthusiasm. They are champions in their field, and they are great in front of the camera.

Ben Mackenzie: I’m a bit worried that there’s an embedded assumption that the academic must do it all and be really on top of all of the changes around them. For me, the approach is about learning design being a bucket in which we can integrate academic expertise and research knowledge, with pedagogical experts, technologists, learning design specialists – a whole range of people. It’s about trying to embed a collaborative approach to learning design within the ­university and to have students involved as reality checkers.

Caroline Steel: I think it [badging] is potentially a way of recognising the informal learning experiences which students may have off campus and in other parts of their lives. Badging is one way for that to happen, recognising learning in smaller chunks, and more context-related learning.

Tim Dodd: Could you issue degrees as an online badge, as well as a certificate, and in the metadata have a much richer description of what that student has achieved and the details of what they have done?

Judyth Sachs: I think for universities to be agile and responsive, we’ve got to think about the opportunities for this. I think the badging idea is something which could be provided by universities in conjunction with professional associations. It would mean the universities were connected and engaged with the professions. But in terms of a whole degree being a badge, is that just semantics and nomenclature?

Larry Johnson: Where it really gets interesting is the notion of awarding credits smaller than a degree.

Then the incentivating aspects of badging come into play. Badging is something you can get in a couple of hours or 15 minutes. It’s the very next goal, it’s a bite-sized piece of something. That has a fresh and new feel to it and, with my revenue hat on, micro-credits sounds like something you could sell.

Larry Johnson: The challenge is that we don’t have big data about learning, not in the traditional classroom, simply because we are not capturing the data. In the online space, it’s a lot more promising because the clickstreams and the actions the students take are all recorded in real time. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty amazing what you can pull out of it. My worry is that we will not take this as far as it should go, that we are going to accept shoddy product and kill the notion. That if it does not deliver on the promise in its early iterations, we will move away from it.

Judyth Sachs: My concern is that governments will take the data out of context in making judgments.

Paul Wappett: I worry about a slightly ­different aspect. The notion that there is value in this data is not fully understood yet. As a sector, we could undersell the value of this data and let someone else take the value and that’s something we need to resist.

Caroline Steel: I think it [the data] has potential in helping students understand how they are approaching learning.

1. Implement threshold standards

Establish and implement institutional threshold standards for learning design, content production, teaching methodologies, student experience and the use of new technology.

2. Promote the catalytic effect of learning technologies

Acknowledge rapidly emerging technologies as drivers for industry change and promote the impact learning technology has on global connectivity, collaboration and understanding.

3. Aggregate learning analytics as a sector

Learning analytics data, aggregated by the sector, is exponentially more valuable than institutional data, or institutional data shared with purely commercial organisations.

4. Develop badging

Develop micro-credits and use metadata to increase student motivation and engagement and to highlight disciplinary expertise and graduate attributes.

5. Remove internal barriers to adoption

Recognise, reward and cultivate technological experimentation and innovation among staff. Provide start-up investment including time, resources and funding.